Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/12

 Annie Pippinger, a small, inconsequential woman in the early forties, was all one color, like an old faded daguerreotype. She may have had some claims to prettiness in the days when Bill courted her; but they had long since gone, leaving her a bit of drab insignificance. Crawford, the eldest boy, was surprisingly handsome and quite as surprisingly indolent of mind and body. The twins, Luella and Lizzie May, were thin, sickly-looking little girls. Lizzie May was pretty in a pale, blond, small-featured way. Luella had a long, pale face, drab hair and dull gray eyes; and her mouth hung open as though she had adenoids. Judith was the third girl, born two years after the twins. After her there was an interval of four years marked for Aunt Annie Pippinger by two miscarriages and a stillborn infant. At the end of this interval a child was born who grew into a chubby, round-eyed, stupid-looking little boy named Elmer.

These children played and quarreled and made discordant, schoolyard noises in the dooryard of a little, three-room shanty standing upon forty-seven acres of heavy clay land which Aunt Annie Pippinger had inherited from her father. The front yard had been plowed up at some time or other but never planted to anything; and the result was a plentiful crop of ragweed, yarrow and pink-blooming soapwort. Two or three rose bushes clung to the broken picket fence and made it gay in June; and by the front door there was a large bush that bore beautiful creamy roses, tinged in the bud ever so slightly with delicate pink. By the back porch a lilac bush as tall as a small tree made April fragrant for the Pippingers.

The back dooryard was beaten bare and hard by the playing feet of children and the dumping of endless tubs of soapsuds and pans of dishwater. A discarded cookstove lying on its side against the back wall of the kitchen, formed the nucleus for a pile of rust-eaten pots and pans. Beyond the bare spot, a fringe of mustard, ragweed, and burdock reached to the picket fence. Along this fence a dozen or so stalks of hollyhock bloomed in summer gorgeously pink and scarlet against a blue sky. The smoke house and the back house occupied